On Tuesday I posted a brief report on lunch at one of the Gurgaon outposts of the North Indian restaurant, Daryaganj. Most of the post was in fact taken up with their battle with the more established restaurant, Moti Mahal, specifically over the ownership of the claim to have originated butter chicken and dal makhani. You can (re)read that post to catch up on the saga but the key facts are these: Moti Mahal was founded in 1947 by three partners, one of whom, K.L Gujral was long-identified with the restaurant and credited as the inventor of butter chicken. The grandson of one of the other partners, K.L Jaggi, opened Daryaganj with a partner a year after his grandfather’s death (and 27 years after he’d exited Moti Mahal) with the marketing claim that it was in fact his grandfather who’d originated butter chicken and dal makhani, thus claiming that history for his new restaurant. A court case later both restaurants are now claiming to have done so. At the M3M IFC complex in Gurgaon they’re doing so within a few hundred feet of each other and 10 days after eating at that branch of Daryaganj we went back to M3M and ate at Moti Mahal. Revisionist/competing historical claims aside, which did we like better? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Gurgaon
Daryaganj (Gurgaon, July 2025)
Revisionist history has been rife in Indian politics for some time now; and so it seems only fitting that it should now also be present in the restaurant world. I am referring not to the many lies Indian restaurants put on menus about village recipes and chefs’ grandmothers but to a very specific and high profile controversy between two Delhi restaurants: Moti Mahal and Daryaganj. The name Moti Mahal may be familiar to you if you have read up on the history of North Indian restaurant food. It was founded in Daryaganj in Old Delhi in 1947 by three friends who had left Peshawar for Delhi during Partition. This is the restaurant at which the previous night’s tandoori chicken was recycled into a rich tomato gravy, thus giving birth to butter chicken (they also lay claim to dal makhani). This has been accepted history for some time now. Well, until 2019 anyway. That’s when a new restaurant named Daryaganj opened, which also claims to be the inventor of butter chicken and dal makhani. Now, you may be wondering how a restaurant that opened in 2019 can lay claim to dishes that everyone agrees another had been making since 1947. That’s where things get spicy. Read on. Continue reading
Chaat, Thrice (Gurgaon, December 2024, March/July 2025)
Okay, let’s jump from Seoul to Delhi but let’s keep the casual market vibe going. No, Delhi doesn’t have anything quite like Gwangjang Market but casual food in markets abounds. This report is of some casual food eaten in a market in Gurgaon (technically a separate city in a different state but part of the Delhi NCR or National Capital Region) across my three most recent trips home: in December last year, earlier this year in March and again this July. All of the meals center on chaat and all were eaten at Galleria, a popular outdoor mall in Gurgaon, some by myself and some with my nephews, who love chaat as much as I do. Continue reading
Ping’s Bia Hoi (Gurgaon, March 2025)
When I am in India, the only food I’m really very interested in eating is Indian food—including Indian Chinese. The primary reason for this is obvious: Indian food in India is far, far superior to that available anywhere in the US, with many regional cuisines and categories not even available there at all. The secondary reason is that, contrariwise, far superior versions of most non-Indian cuisines available in India exist in the US. And so I don’t really see much point in wasting my eating out slots on short trips home on Italian or (non-Indian) Chinese or Japanese or Vietnamese or Korean or Mexican food etc. etc. in India. This doesn’t always mesh well, however, with the preferences of my friends and family here. While they do go out to eat at Indian restaurants as well, they’re often more excited to visit non-Indian restaurants. This is how we ended up at Gung in January 2023, for example. And this is also how I ended up on this trip at Ping’s Bia Hoi, a nominally Vietnamese but really pan-Asian restaurant at the swanky One Horizon Center in Gurgaon. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Zambar (Gurgaon, December 2024)
Another Delhi restaurant report, another thali-based meal. As I noted recently, I use the name “Delhi” a little loosely in my restaurant reports to refer to the NCR or National Capital Region, which includes Gurgaon and Noida, which are not just separate cities but are part of different states (Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, respectively). I bring this up because the meal I am reporting on today was eaten at a restaurant in Gurgaon: at Zambar in the Ambience Mall off of National Highway 48. Even by the gargantuan scale of modern Indian malls, Ambience is particularly massive and alienating. But there were some specific things I needed to shop for and some specific things I was interested in eating and that is how I ended up eating a thali at Zambar. Continue reading